Many merchants, particularly those who sell wares through catalog and internet services, must package and ship individual orders. Standard size cartons are used. Since the individual orders vary in volume and weight and seldom completely fill a standard carton, it is necessary to provide dunnage to fill packages to protect the contents of packages during shipment.
Currently foamed plastic elements known as peanuts are widely used. Peanuts enjoy popularity because of their relatively small size and light weight. The small sizes provide ready filling of a wide range of sizes of spaces in packages being formed.
While peanuts are popular, they have distinct disadvantages. A major disadvantage, is that a substantial volume of storage space is required to maintain an inventory. A further major disadvantage is, in a large use environment a very substantial capital investment is required for delivering the peanuts to packaging stations.
A troublesome disadvantage is peanuts produce substantial quantities of dust. Further, because of their very light weight, the peanuts, when dispensed into packages, do not all find their way into packages being formed. Rather they create litter around each packaging station. Moreover, when a package is opened and the contents are removed, a customer opening such a package is invariably confronted with a clean-up job because peanuts are seemingly everywhere around the site where the package was opened.
U.S. Pat. Nos. RE36,501 and RE36,759 to Hoover et al. disclose and claim methods of making dunnage from a chain of interconnected bags (the Hoover Patents). Application Ser. No. 09/315,413 filed May 20, 1999 by Bernard Lerner, PCT application No. PCT/US00/13784 filed May 18, 2000 as a continuation-in-part thereof (The PCT Application), and a concurrently filed continuation-in-part of both (09/735,345) (The Continuation Application) each disclose improved methods and apparatus for producing dunnage units by inflating and sealing interconnected pouches. The Continuation Application is hereby incorporated in its entirety by reference.
The Hoover Patents and the referenced applications each disclose dunnage units which have tacky external surfaces that stick together. While such tacky dunnage units are highly advantageous for shipment of heavy products, for many packages such tackiness is not required. Moreover, such tackiness tends to be counterproductive to the supply of dunnage units at the rates of speed required by businesses which market products via catalogs and the internet, in that packaging must be accomplished with dispatch. Further, because the tacky units adhere to one another, rapid filling of voids in a package being created may be inhibited. In addition, there are many applications where tackiness is not required or desirable so that the provision of tackiness simply adds to the cost of the units.